Category Archives: CrisisCommons

Our Italian colleagues are holding their second CrisisCamp in Bologna on March 17, 2012. The day will be marked by an exploration of the growing trend toward the use of social media in emergency management. The SMEM community is nothing new for CrisisCommons as we have sponsored and organized many meetings on this topic in the last couple of years.

Francesco Ciriaci, a co-founder of CrisisCamp Italia explains the reasons behind the March 17 gathering:

In the past weeks we all witness the emergecies occured in Italy: the earthquake and the snow. The web is actually playing an important role in the exchange of information, and Twitter is becoming an acknowledged source of information, also for the talk shows and tv news.

Crisis Camp Italia is organizing a one-day camp to discuss operational proposals on how to use Twitter and social media to propagate information about risks, and emergency.
We are aiming to collaboratively define a one-page poster explaining the very basics of SMEM to citizens: the do (and don’ts) of social media in emergency and promote it in Italy.

Registration is open and free: http://smem0.eventbrite.com
(event will be in Italian, only, with live Tweeting in italian and english.

A great piece from Emergency Management Magazine with a focus on CrisisCommons.
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Technical-Communities-Redefine-Volunteerism.html

Great work from our Irish and European colleagues in promoting their work. Their contributions to humanitarian assistance and readiness to help when disasters strike is featured in a very positive light. Congrats Evert!

Here’s a link to the story:

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/25743-crisiscamp-shows-how-open/

Great work from our Irish and European colleagues in promoting their work. Their contributions to humanitarian assistance and readiness to help when disasters strike is featured in a very positive light. Congrats Evert!

Here’s a link to the story: http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/25743-crisiscamp-shows-how-open/

Severe weather slams Europe … The Balkans are particularly affected.  Here’s a summary from the Associated Press via the Washington Post. The Al-Jazeera network is asking our colleagues from the Standby Task Force for their deployment in the Balkans for the snow/cold emergency.  Here are a couple of stories from the network on the ongoing emergency:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/02/201225141223210347.html

http://www.aljazeera.com/weather/2012/01/20121309403666565.html 

We’re helping the StandBy Task Force to answer Al Jazeera’s call for help by disseminating the request for help.  They asked us to help them in recruiting volunteers from the region and for this reason we are looking for volunteers that:

1. Speak the following Languages:

• Bosnian
• Croatian
• Serbian
• Slovenian
• Macedonian
• Albanian

2. Or that come from the following countries:

•  Bosnia
•  Slovenia
•  Macedonia
•  Serbia
•  Montenegro
•  Croatia
•  Kosovo
•  Bulgarian

If you do, or know people that do, please contact Anahi (anahi@standbytaskforce.com) or Patrick (patrick@standbytaskforce.com)

Photo Credit to tourism.tallinn.ee

Heather and Noel–

First and foremost:  Thank you!

Your shared vision, passion and energy made CrisisCommons a sustainable force for good in the world.  We will all miss your active leadership in the CrisisCommons community.  I know you will be incredibly successful at whatever you decide to apply yourself to in life.

I wanted to share with the community how I became one of the first CrisisCampers, attending the inaugural CrisisCamp DC event in June 2009.  It came, appropriately enough, through twitter.  I had become increasingly aware of the planned CrisisCamp through its promotion on twitter by those like-minded individuals interested in helping the victims of disaster with technology – a field I have been in for close to 20 (gasp!) years now.  But I wasn’t planning on attending – it being all the way in Washington, DC and me living so far away (spur sarcasm) in Brooklyn, NY – until one of my own Sahana community members from India tweeted me asking whether I was going to go to the CrisisCamp.  It made me pause and think that this event might be different, if people from half way around the world had heard of it and were interested in attending – an event I had considered until that time to be a very insular and too inside-the-beltway focused to be of any value.  So I took a look at the eventbrite link (which is still up there today: http://crisiscamp.eventbrite.com).

What struck me about the event was not just the vision and agenda for the event, but who was coming that marked it as significant – with significant representation from the US Government, the World Bank, technology companies, academic and research groups, and an incredible number of individuals with experience – some of these people I knew personally, others I knew of professionally and others I wanted to get to know.  So I made plans to attend, packed up my family in the car and drove to DC for the weekend.  At the Ignite sessions on Friday evening at the World Bank, I met Noel and Heather for the first time, and we’ve since become close allies professionally and friends personally.  Along with Andrew, they share a vision for a Commons and have always balanced well the need for leadership with the independence of the community.
Sometimes I thought that they needed to step up and be more decisive about making decisions – but they understood their role was to bring people to the table – not to direct.  CrisisCommons has become a far more resilient and successful organization than I could ever have imagined because of the blood, sweat and tears that they put into it.

And it has spurned on other efforts such as Random Hacks of Kindness and the Standby Task Force.

I know this is not a community that feels comfortable directly credit at individuals, but every time someone attends a CrisisCamp, a RHOK, a GWOB hackathon, or supports a deployment of the Standby Task Force, they have Heather and Noel to thank, in part, for that opportunity to make the world a better place.

I know I do.

Love bombs right back at you.

Best regards,
Mark

CrisisCommons would like to thank Heather Blanchard for her vision and commitment to the organization. She has been instrumental in building the organization from its inception to the global network it has become. We wish her the best in her academic endeavours and assure the community that the goals and ambitions of CrisisCommons will continue to be pursued, with the leadership of the Interim Management Team.

Heather was a visionary and a founder, and co-founder Noel Dickover (both at right with Andrew Turner, also a co-founder); CrisisCommons will continue to move forward, build her vision, and make her proud.

Thank you, Heather and Noel and good luck!

From everyone at CrisisCommons

we hope that you and your family

have a safe and happy holiday season!

** See you in 2012 **

(Image: Wikipedia)

On Wednesday November 10, 2011 a community of emergency management practitioners in collaboration with a volunteer research team at CNA, released a report of the findings of the March 2011 Social Media in Emergency Management Camp. During this event emergency managers and practitioners gathered to discuss the opportunities and challenges of using social media and other emerging technologies in emergency management. The primary objective of the gathering was to capture best practices, challenges, future engagement and training opportunities.

SMEM Camp event brought together more than 150 members of the U.S. emergency management community convened to discuss how social media and emerging technologies are affecting response operations. Findings of this event, along with additional collaboration with the community, has yielded the first independent, community-led report reflecting the needs and challenges of our nation’s emergency services systems ability to leverage social media tools to support emergency management functions, not only during crisis events but during preparedness, recovery and mitigation efforts.

SMEM Camp was hosted by the National Emergency Management Association (NO) and the SMEM Initiative, in collaboration with CrisisCommons. Participants included representatives from state and local emergency management agencies, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the American Red Cross, Twitter^©, companies like Citibank, and volunteer technology communities. SMEM Camp was a direct response to changes in societal expectations of emergency responders (e.g., the timeliness of response) brought about by the emergence of social media and related technologies over the past decade.

The participants and researchers collaborated with hopes to share an independent and grassroots practitioner perspective which can to shed light on current opportunities and challenges with regards to use of social media across the entire emergency management spectrum. To view the report and its resources you can click to http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/SMEM_Initiative or the below links:

• Social Media in Emergency Management Camp: Transforming the Response Enterprise Report: http://scr.bi/uy5H0w
• SMEM Report Factsheet: http://scr.bi/ts1fFP
• SMEM Report Annex B: Virtual Operations Support Group/Team http://scr.bi/VOSGTConcept
• SMEM Report Annex C: Social Media in Emergency Management: the Canadian experience http://scr.bi/SMEMCanada

About the SMEM Initiative

The Social Media in Emergency Management Initiative “SMEM” is an informal network of emergency management practitioners who seek to explore best practices and bridge social media in emergency management. SMEM seeks to build a common understanding and “experience exchange” to support the use and inclusion of social media, public data and technology innovation to support mission objectives of emergency management to prepare for, respond to, recover from and mitigate against disaster.  To join the conversation, visit the #SMEM hash tag and be sure to visit the #SMEMchat each Friday at 12:30PM EST where there is a live discussion. Check out news and archive topics at at www.sm4em.org and wiki.crisiscommons.org and be sure to join the practitioner email group at http://groups.google.com/group/smem.